HPC meets interactive Data Science and Machine Learning

Carme (/ˈkɑːrmiː/ KAR-mee; Greek: Κάρμη) is a Jupiter moon, also giving the name for a Cluster of Jupiter moons (the carme group).

or in our case...

an open source framework to manage resources for multiple users running interactive jobs on a Cluster of (GPU) compute nodes.

This documentation is divided in the following sections:

Carme Presentation

Carme is simple and easy to use. Take a look at our Dashboard page.

With 2 clicks you are already working in your project using HPC resources. Refer to our marketing slides for more:

We combine established open source ML and DS tools with HPC backends and use therefore

Singularity containers
Anaconda environments
web–based GUI frontends e.g. Code-Server and JupyterLab
completely web frontend based
(OS independent, no installation on user side needed)
HPC job management and schedulers (SLURM)
HPC data I/O technologies like Fraunhofer’s BeeGFS
HPC maintenance and monitoring tools

Job submission scheme

Open source
- we use only open source components that allow commercial usage
- Carme is open source, allowing commercial usage
Seamless integration with available HPC tools
- Job scheduling via SLURM
- Native LDAP support for user authentication
- Integrate existing distributed file systems like BeeGFS
Access via web-interface
- OS independent (only web browser needed)
- requires 2FA
- Full user information (running jobs, cluster usage, news / messages)
- Start/Stop jobs within the web-interface
Interactive jobs
- Flexible access to accelerators
- Access via web driven GUIs like code server or JupyterLab
- Job specific monitoring information in the web-interface
  (GPU/FPGA/CPU utilization, memory usage, access to TensorBoard)
Distributed multi-node and/or multi-gpu jobs
- Easy and intuitive job scheduling
- Directly use GPI, GPI-Space, MPI, HP-DLF and Horovod within the jobs
Full control about accounting and resource management
- Job scheduling according to user/project specific roles
- Compute resources are user/project exclusive
User maintained, containerized environments
- Singularity containers
  (runs as normal user, GPU, Ethernet and Infiniband support)
- Anaconda Environments
  (easy updates, project / user specific environments)
- Built-in matching between GPU driver and ML/DL tools

Refer to our documentation.

11/2024
- Carme-demo 1.0:
  - Installation script to test Carme in Debian and RedHat based systems. Refer to our installation documentation.
  - Adapted to GPU clusters with pre-set SLURM and MySQL.
  - Adapted to multi-users in Debian based systems.
  - Adapted to single-users in RedHat based systems.
- Carme r1.0:
  - Jupyter notebooks start in the Home directory.

04/2025
- Carme-demo 1.1:
  - Adapted to systems with pre-existing LDAP.
- Carme r1.1:
  - Carme runs in AWS (Amazon Web Services).